As the House returns Tuesday for the final session of his first term, Obama’s failure to fulfill this central claim of his 2008 campaign has never been more glaringly obvious.

The hard truth is that Washington next year will look indistinguishable from the one Obama warned against during his election-night victory speech, when he called on Republicans and Democrats to “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”

His relationship with Republican lawmakers is broken, the victim of grand expectations and hardball political tactics, irreconcilable policy differences and perceived personal snubs.

Obama’s early promises to invite lawmakers to the White House for weekly cocktails and congressional leaders for monthly meetings sound oddly quaint. His days of personally courting rank-and-file Republicans for votes are long gone. The broad majorities that senior Obama aides once predicted for major legislation never materialized.

The degree of dysfunction may not matter much through November, but it will in a second term if Obama wants to build on a legacy that hasn’t racked up a major legislative achievement since his first two years in office. At that point, Obama may very well find himself with a more Republican Congress than the one he struggles with now.

“I don’t see anything changing,” said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and senior director at Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a lobbying firm. “Long term for the president, it is going to be very tough going. It is going to be very difficult to operate on Capitol Hill in the next couple of years because the legislative process has all but broken down. And anyone who thinks that the elections are going to change everything needs to get their head examined.”

Obama issued the divorce papers to Congress this month when, in an unprecedented institutional snub, he unilaterally installed a new consumer watchdog and new appointees to the National Labor Relations Board over the objections of Senate Republicans. Obama already had decided to lash Congress from the campaign trail for the next year, and his aides made clear that the president has essentially given up on wringing any major legislation out of the place until after the election.

To his senior aides, the president had no other choice. To Hill Democrats, the breakup was painfully overdue after Republicans spent three years blocking much of what Obama put forward — even when they had supported the proposals in the past, even when he infuriated Democrats in pursuit of their votes — as part of a strategy of near-uniform opposition.